Tuesday, April 28, 2015

What's Better for a Changing World?

Increasing your bet on the digital is best for dealing with a changing world. You will probably start with a mobile first mentality, but eventually you will have to get past just a new "sizzling" interface for your customers, partners and employees. This means a premium on smart dynamic agility that can be built into your processes, workers, applications, APIs and other code chunks. This is particularly true when the processes can figure out how they should configure and execute to reach a set of evolving goals. This is where swarming kicks in it's contribution to keeping your processes "eye on the ball" while dynamics occur in and around your business model. These processes will be made up of executable task that swarm to accomplish goals. See below for the type of agents that will auto align with your goals. Hybrid processes will be created just in time to attain goals and outcomes

The Opportunity to Coordinate More Resource Types:

In the past process efforts were just content to save costs with incremental improvements with a simple set of resources mainly heads down workers and large chucks of systems. It turns out that process became good at differentiating a business and providing benefits for more types of resources such as knowledge workers and managers. This, in turn, makes processes ideal for the new kinds of resources emerging from the IoT, robotics, proliferating APIs and a big data analytic world. Be prepared for a rapid expansion of the types of resources leveraged in processes.

The Opportunity to Coordinate Many More Resources:

The explosion of resources is also happening simultaneously with the advent of the IoT, wearable devices and APIs. Add cognitive agents (COGs) in the cloud that assist all the resources in ways we never imagined and we now have an explosive situation for both innovation and management headaches. Again process takes a role in managing these resources with transparency and accountability. Even so, centralized control of a process may not be able to handle it all.

The Opportunity to Have Smart Resources Do Some of the Coordination:

Some resources will have the intelligence to manage sub-tasks and flows, dynamic or static, so that the centralized process can delegate the management of certain resources in a "black box" fashion, keeping mind that the box can change colors and take care of the central process by looking at the goals, constraints and patterns of interest. Will certain processes become 100 decentralized? We aren't ready for that just yet, but the technology makes it possible. Probable is another story.

Net; Net:

Get ready fir an increased set of resources that will need to be managed in real time to stay competitive while we transition to a more digital world. Forms of swarming will start to emerge over the upcoming years.